1. Technical Field
Various embodiments of the present invention relate to circuitry analysis tools, and more specifically, to a circuitry analysis tool for reverse engineering a circuit design.
2. Description of Related Art
Engineers often need to organize electrical circuits to understand how they function. Essentially, circuits consist of cells, and connections between cells. Chipworks has tools which allow an engineer to group logic cells together based on connections between them. For a circuit that is simple with a small number of components and connections the engineer may arrive at a plausible organization of the entire circuit in a reasonable amount of time. However, as the number of cells and connections grows, the conventional method becomes increasingly difficult to use. For example, a modest digital circuit may contain tens of thousands of components, and at least as many connections between them. Grouping logic cells by tracing connections one-by-one is not practical for large circuits such as this. It takes far too much time. This inefficiency and delay may have further consequences for the business inasmuch as it may cause projects to take too long to complete and cost too much. Project costs tend to increase proportionally, a factor that may deter sales for large projects.